It Doesn’t Ask for Permission

By C.J. Rodriguez

I can be watching television, reading a book, or talking to someone when the lights interrupt my vision. They don’t ask for permission. They’re just there.

I live with retinitis pigmentosa. One part of my experience is photopsia. Earlier on, I noticed it when I stood up quickly, laughed hard, or moved between different temperatures. Now it can happen while I’m just having a conversation.

Sometimes I can feel it coming. There’s a particular heaviness in my head that’s hard to explain, but I know the feeling. The lights are about to invade my vision.

Mostly, it’s irritating. I’m trying to go about my day.

I gave Lyora, one of the four Huntresses in my dark-fantasy story Bloom of the Huntresses, pieces of what I experience. She has something of my photopsia, with more disorientation and mental exhaustion tied to her abilities. In the cinematic audio-manga, I show white lights from her perspective. In the novel, I deliberately leave it ambiguous. She has to stop and reorient herself, and the person beside her doesn’t notice.

Bloom started with these girls in my head. I wanted to get their story out. The cinematic work came before the novel, and the music lets me express their thoughts and beliefs. I don’t know what my vision will be like years from now. I know what I have today, and I want to make the most of it.

I didn’t create Bloom to be an inspiration. But if someone living with sight loss sees it and thinks their own dream is still worth pursuing, that would be pretty cool. This disease makes life harder. I kept going, and now the story exists outside my head.

In this excerpt, Lyora uses an ability called Judgment to save Reika. Afterward, she needs a moment herself.

From Chapter Eight of Bloom of the Huntresses:

Reika opened her eyes.

The scepter was in the ground three feet to her left, still resonating from the impact, and the woman holding it had her eyes closed and her expression completely still — not peaceful, not serene, just absent of anything that wasn't absolute focus. Like the surface of water before something breaks it.

The garden came.

Not gradually. Not the way things grow. More the way a held breath releases — all at once, and then it was simply there, and the wasteland wasn't, and the air had changed from the flat dead nothing of compacted earth to something that had weight and color and the particular quality of a place that had decided to exist and meant it. Green. The specific green of things that had been growing for a long time without anyone's permission. Roots that knew where they were going. Moss across surfaces that hadn't had surfaces a moment ago. Flowers that opened without any apparent urgency, the way things open when they have always been going to open and are simply doing so now.

The soldier had stopped.

He was still holding the sword above his head. He stood in it — in the garden, in the green, in the air that had no business being this alive in a place like this — and something went out of him. Not dramatically. It didn't announce itself. It simply left, the way certainty leaves a person when they have been seen completely and found wanting, and then his arms came down, and then he came down, and the garden received him the way it received everything — without comment, without ceremony. He was on his knees and then he was still and the sword was in the grass beside him and that was the end of it.

Reika watched this.

She said nothing.

[…]

The wasteland was back.

Brown. Flat. Dead in the specific way this particular ground had always been dead — not recently, not as a consequence of anything that had just occurred here, just constitutionally, the way some places simply are. The garden was gone and it had left no evidence of itself except the soldier on his knees in the dust and Reika still breathing.

She became aware of footsteps beside her.

She looked up.

Lyora was there. The scepter was back at her side and her eyes were open and she was looking at Reika the way she looked at most things: steadily, without apparent agenda, as though she had arrived at an accurate assessment and saw no reason to perform anything around it.

She didn't ask if Reika was alright.

Reika didn't offer that she was.

She took the help getting up. Not graciously, not ungraciously. She simply accepted the structural reality that standing required assistance at this particular moment and used what was available. When she was upright she straightened her clothes and pushed her hair back from her face with one hand.

Lyora took a step back.

Reika's eyes moved to the far edge of the wasteland. Not at the soldiers. Not at Lyora. At the specific geography of a place she was already somewhere inside of — the layout of it, the thing the soldier had said before everything had gone the way it went. It was still there. The thread of it. She hadn't lost it.

She didn't notice when Lyora stepped back.

She was already gone.

❖

Lyora didn't watch her go vacant. She was simply aware of it.

She stood in the quiet of the wasteland. Both hands found the scepter. She lowered her head slightly. Closed her eyes. The ground felt uncertain in a way the ground shouldn't, and she waited — still, private, unhurried — for it to pass.

It passed.

She opened her eyes.

Reika was still there. Still elsewhere.

Lyora said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Read Chapter One of Bloom of the Huntresses free on Royal Road